The Stuff of Nightmares

Where's my mind? by ~Leandra20

Inspiration Response for Production Project:

My earliest memory is a nightmare I had when I were just shy of two years old. I remember very clearly pulling myself up by the banister of my wooden cot to an unsteady standing position. Everything around me had vanished save my cot and my own body.  The two of us were suspended in a dimensionless blank white.  I attempted to locate some sort of familiarity in the unusual circumstance I was in.  It became immediately apparent that the aural dimension had remained although somewhat deteriorated. I could hear a multitude of muffled voices and from these I managed to discern the voices of my parents. I cried for their attention and woke myself in the process.

 I have always been fortunate enough (and at times quite unfortunate) to remember my dreams very clearly and thus have an acute interest in determining the frontier between ‘reality’ and ‘illusion’. That is to say if this is even boundary at all or perhaps a communication between the two?  Arguably we are quick to relegate reality to the material realm and dismiss the illusionary to the less well-understood processes of the mind. The impetus of the subconscious in driving a subject’s sense of reality I believe is a heavily underrated phenomenon.

 In light of this it was the psychological component of cluster two that resonated with me most prominently. The notion of reframing the viewer’s (user’s?!) attention to a different focal point in their sense of reality other to what they’re accustomed seems exciting and well suited to the spirit of interactive design in general since in a way you are attempting to construct an alternate reality for them to operate within. What I would like to explore is the exaltation of the visual image in communicative culture and our unwavering dependency upon it. I would like to attempt to provide the user with a situation where they are stripped of the visual as a means of negotiating with the environment and must rely on other sensory clues. This idea was particularly inspired by Auditory Spatial Awareness (Salter and Blesser 2007), which highlights the ambient soundscape as an often-disregarded crucial element in spatial typography. Beyond the obvious functional implication of ambient aural elements to a space, they are generally not considered as being conducive to the construction of that space. I would like to realign the user’s attention to the inherent power of ambient sound in spatial navigation and particularly in memory association.

 The dreaming process is sometimes explained as the subject’s subconscious cataloguing experiences into the memory thus suggesting a fundamental relationship between the realm of dream ‘surrealism’ and memory ‘reality’, a relationship that I would like to explore further in my project.

 The idea of projection as discussed in Projection: Vanishing and Becoming (Cubitt 2007) intrigued me particularly the notion of echo. It is a beautiful idea to consider the possibility of projecting a representation of oneself outward and to see how this projection reacts with the environment around it. In this way, I would like to ‘project’ my earliest sensory experience that I can remember (i.e. the nightmare) onto the user and see how the user interacts with that projection. This also provides a nice allegory to the more traditional notion of the aural echo, which forms the basis of this project.

White Room, Green Chair by Daniel Cooper, B.A.